Posts by Oneman2Many

Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place

Re: Hoping Musk's rocket goes kaboom

You realise that there are 15,000 engineers that are actually doing the work ? They deserve failure as well ?

Damming report on NASA management of Lander contracts

In a timely manner, NASA internal review of SpaceX and Blue Origin lander contracts. Aside from keeping on budget, the remainder is a damming report on NASA management for basically being railroaded by contractors for unsafe designs, risky technology, poor planning, lack of testing in the contracts, no rescue provisioning, NASA insisting on manual controls which SpaceX haven't included and development of both landers running late.

Mentions that SX were fined $1.5m for failing to meet milestones and date for Artemis 5 (BO landing) will slip past 2028.

NASA’s Management of the Human Landing System Contracts - NASA OIG https://share.google/rD0NgEXaoctSPOwyJ

NASA abandons delayed SLS upper stage for ULA's Centaur V instead

NASA releases update on SpaceX and Blue Origin lander systems, this is after their behind closed door visits and reviews,

About the only positive is that fixed price contract is working and budget is under control. And that is the end of the good news, conflicts about manual controls, complexity, both landers are behind schedule, lots of unproven tech, HLS will need minimum 10 refuelling mission, blue origin will need multiple refuelling, neither has tested technology, there is more but suffice to say that my money is now on Chinese as their mission is much less ambitious (basically Apollo) and currently further behind.

https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/final-report-ig-26-004-nasas-management-of-the-human-landing-system-contracts.pdf

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/nasa-and-spacex-disagree-about-manual-controls-for-lunar-lander/

Re: Cancellation by stealth?

The aim for next year is to HLS into LEO and dock, that is it for Artemis 3. SpaceX are contracted to do a unmanned demo landing (hopefully more than one) but the schedule for that is before Artemis 4.

Ship 45 has been seen spotting white thermal protections tiles. Rumours it could a HLS test article.

Re: Centaur: tried and tested - good decision.

And human crewed Starliner. On a side note, rumours saying the extra CCP missions needed for the life extension to ISS could go to Starliner.

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

Re: Not going to happen

What, as opposed to have no lander at all ?

And BTW, both SX and BO mission profiles include in space refuelling

Re: It's a dead end

NASA has contracted Aerojet Rocketdyne $3bn for 24 uprated RS-25E single use engines. I am sure it seemed good value at the time the contract was signed. That takes them to Artemis X

Re: Not going to happen

Blue Moon Mk1 is sometime in 2026 but still no scheduled date, I believe the lander is currently undergoing vacuum testing. Aiming for around 3ton cargo compared to Apollo'w 1 ton.

Blue Moon Mk2 which is human lander has no date and no confirmation that construction has even started. Its a multi vehicle mission involving multiple in space refuelling and use of an uprated New Glenn 9x4 configuration (9 engines on 1st stage, 4 on second with 8.7m fairing, 70 ton payload)

There is rumours of a Mk 1.5, based on Mk 1 but with human rating, single launch mission that can do a limited mission without refuelling. Its has more capability that Apollo but still basically limited to footprints and flag type mission. I assume this is what they are planning to use for Artemis III. Is it an accurate representation of Mk2, who knows.

Re: Not going to happen

SX or BO ?

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Re: Quite a long to consider „rethinking“

You've been banging on for a while about all the things that SX can't do and yet they most of the time they have managed. For somebody who works in the space industry you don't seem to be keeping up with development, maybe you are working or starliner or something ?

As for Artemis, fortunately NASA are aiming for something more than footstep and flag which means having more than 1,000 cargo capacity that Apollo had.

Re: "in-space refuelings"

Reality is nobody outside of SpaceX (and maybe NASA) knows how many tankers, boil off rates, redundant capability, launch rates, etc.

I assume NASA has some details on what the plan is and some level of confidence.

Re: "in-space refuelings"

We don't know how many refuelling mission there will be, Elon said it could be as low as 4 with a block 4 starship meaning around 1,000 propellant will be required.

Yes, the refuelling missions will be recovered (booster and ship), nothing to indicate otherwise.

Not every refuelling mission has to work, you think there won't be some redundancy. Need 10 launches then plan for 12.

Do agree that 2028 is optimistic but its still doable assuming Artemis II goes well.

Apollo had a cargo capability of under 1,000 kg. Later mission managed just over 1,000kg.

Artemis is aiming for 60 tons at a fraction of the cost.

Mostly luck

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Article is right, there are ton of companies running virtual clients but very few are using thin clients to access them. The vast majority use regular PC.

Re: Thin clients were unreliable enough when it was all on-prem

Pretty much every school (primary at least) runs chromebooks. I've converted quite a few myself and they work just fine, no server needed.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

He has been asked this and the answer was that he has been approached NASA since he did.

The issue is that there isn't a suitable option, if you want to do a human mission and assuming that NASA won't let you use Russian or Chinese capsule, that leaves one choice and it isn't capable of the mission without major changes. Alternative is a build a specialised robotic satellite and that is going to take some time.

Regardless the mission is likely to cost in excess of $100m so aside from Jarred, Elon or Jeff, I don't know who has deep enough pockets to throw away that amount and the passion to do it ?

Jarred had offered to pay for it out of his own pocket at the time, NASA said no as they were worried that somebody getting killed or made the situation worse.

Anyway, cost wise its not worth saving. But if somebody has money to burn for sentiment reasons then sure, give it a go.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Re: ISS de-orbit

The problem is the energy required to get to lagrange point is more than just dumping used satellites back to earth unless you are willing to pay them for the scape. In which case I am sure there are probably some rag and bone guys who will do it cheaper with their unregistered business.

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Re: Low energy to high orbit?

The largest ION engine produced uses approximately 100 Kw of power. This is good as ISS generates around 100Wk of PV power. Your problem is that 100Kw ION engine generates about 5 newtons of trusts. ISS needs around 6,500 newtons of thrust to do a controlled deorbit.

Re: Cheaper source

Its orbital mechanics, something NASA knows something about. They 100% will know how much energy it takes to boost to various orbits and the structural integrity of the station. Most of that work will have been re-done recently when they used Cygnus and Dragon to do boost burns plus they will have provided de-orbiting specs.

In fact 2 secs on Google tells you for a 100 year orbit is going to take 120 to 140 m/s of delta or 740m/s for a much longer lasting one. Assuming the station isn't going to fall apart applying that much delta V.

You can be see de-orbit will take 57 m/s which is what dragon will supply using approx. 9 to 11 tons of propellant.

https://www.nasa.gov/faqs-the-international-space-station-transition-plan/#:~:text=Ignoring%20the%20requirement%20of%20keeping,s%20for%20a%20controlled%20deorbit.

Not long, its been falling apart for years, especially the Russian modules. Just having 3 crew on it currently is risky to its operations as it is.

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

There are many observers now asking if Boeing are even going to both with Starliner, there are a limited number of remaining flights to ISS and Dragon has sewn up what commercial market there is. And remember this is fixed price contract so any fixes are coming out of Boeing's pocket with some estimates putting that at $2bn and rising. At least ISS maintenance is a cash cow for Boeing for the time being but will end in a few years.

Re: Never Never

It is a comment on USA. Trump pushing for more deregulation and self governing industries.

I won't say Rook is bullet proof but he is there to deliver on return to the moon. ISS has become a side show and lots of comments wondering if Boeing are even going to bother trying to fix the issues.

Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators

Re: Starlink is not intended for urban areas like Jakarta

Bandwidth is the best metric, ultimately its is what is needed to satisfy your customers. The key is start filling the shells where there are the most customers and where you are bandwidth constrained. You leave the existing 12,000 satellites to provide global coverage. In fact they already have global coverage with the 10,000 sats they will have by March, so coverage isn't an issue

As for replacements, Assume 5 year lifespan, that is 50 a month they need to keep launching, or one Starship launch. SpaceX would like to get around 30,000 v3 sats including direct to cell, we'll see about that.

Cost of F9 launch for Starlink is around $50m, cost of Starship is thought to be closer to $20m once they have regular cadence.

Re: Starlink is not intended for urban areas like Jakarta

With Falcon, my guess is its not viable long term but with Starship they can launch 5x the amount of bandwidth per launch at less cost.

Re: Not a fan

Been pretty stable whenever i have had need to use it. Don't know if you are in a crowded area or you have LAN issues.

Cisco set to release home-brew hypervisor as a VMware alternative

Because no offence but Proxmox is not enterprise grade. Nutanix is massively overpriced for what it is, they are working on getting the cost down but its not much of a cost saving over VMWare, just means you won't have to do business with Broadcom.

Cisco don't support Nutanix or Hyper-V.

And you won't be managing it, Cisco would be. For a fee of course.

SpaceX halts Falcon 9 flights after second stage anomaly

In case anybody is still following, SpaceX concluded that relight failure was most likely causes by an air bubble in transfer tube. Ironically most likely because of new propellant loading procedure designed to improve reliability. I guess they now know its not giving more reliability, lol Anyway nice to see they are still trying to improve F9.

With manned Soyuz out of commission and Starliner slightly behind on certification that leaves no method of launching crew to ISS currently.

On a side note, SpaceX yesterday removed the crew access arm from F9 pad at 39A. That leaves SLIC-40 as the only human capable pad in the US. They have stopped launching from 39A to focus on Starship but at least it had been there as a backup.

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

Currently costing $25k for servers we paid $12k for in December. And its only going up, we are trying to purchase our 2027 requirements right now.

Google soaks up 1GW of Texas sunshine to power $185B AI spending spree

Re: COMMUNISM!

No, they should be burning Venezuelan oil.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

1. Panels may have the same efficiency but you get around 220W per m2 on earth but 1,350 per m2 in space.

2. We will have to see, there are companies claiming to have cracked this but obviously nobody has demo'ed this at scale.

4. That I have less worry about. Its crazy how actually they can track satellites so accurately these days, laser links already between satellites that are moving at 10,000 mph relative to each other. Of course you do have the added complications of having to deal with earth's atmosphere but I'm sure its something they are working on.

1. Plenty of power, solar panels are 5x more efficient in space.

2. They seem to cracked that issue, we will see.

3. Plenty of modern electronics is shielded from radiation.

4. 6Tb of bandwidth fast enough ? And that is just to ground. There will be more satellite to satellite

Alphabet own 9% of SpaceX who have just filled with FAA to build a million satellite data centre in space.

Re: Overflow

I thought Ireland had their hands slapped by the EU over their non-taxing of Apple ?

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Re: Criminalize paying ransom

You can stop USB file access while still allowing other USB devices such as headsets, keyboard/mouse and docks to work fairly easily with group policy.

Rocket Lab's Neutron schedule under pressure after unexpected tank rupture

Neutron does have a slight lower payload capacity than F9 but its also cheaper. And seeing as very few non-starlink payloads need the full capacity of F9, they will get a cost benefit of using Neutron.

Also Neutron is designed to be fully reusable, not partially as stated in the article.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Re: But this is support

Its correct but how many companies will keep driving vehicles that haven't been serviced and the breakdown service won't touch as you can't get parts for them either.

Re: Tesco getting a dose of their own treatment

They are currently migrating to proxmox for VM hosting and OpenShift for CaaS, they aren't buying any more VMWare products.

Its not the license ownership that is the issue, its that they couldn't buy any support after the 5 years which they believed they had a right to extend. And I don't think any enterprise would run their critical systems without official support.

Warwickshire school to reopen after cyberattack crippled IT

Re: the school lost access to infrastructure "essential for the safe operation of the school

And when did you go to school ?

Re: the school lost access to infrastructure "essential for the safe operation of the school

The issue is that the school is locked out of their admin systems, very little to do with the classroom itself. Overlay trying to keep safeguarding in place, organising classes, timetables and students, there is no paper fall back for some of these process. And who knows how much of the building control got knocked out.

That is for around 1,500 students and probably several hundred staff.

Congress throws NASA a lifeline, leaves Mars sample mission to die in the dust

Re: China?

The idea was that by the time people are going there that they know what to expect. Anyway, the latest news is that Mars is being deprioritised because of datacentre in space idea.

They have approved budget for a new MSR proposal. To be honest, the current proposal had got out of hand. It was way too complicated, running late and over budget.

Rook has said several times that he thinks NASA is overstaffed with paper pushers and has too many centres of operations so was looking at making better use of the budget but don't know how long it will take to make changes. He's currently touring the various facilities.

India’s flagship PSLV rocket fails for the second time in a row

"but you do pay less than if you insist on a brand new one"

You actually pay more. SpaceX are still producing boosters but at a much reduced rate, Wiki suggest 8 boosters had their first flight in 2025. I was surprised to learn they only have around 20 to 25 active boosters to support around 170 F9 launches a year.